“If there is in fact, a heaven and a hell, all we know for sure is that hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix.”

As your attorney, it is my duty to inform you that it is not important that you understand what I’m doing or why you’re paying me so much money. What’s important is that you continue to do so.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

Wake up and ponder the future.

A sense of humor is the main measure of sanity.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God and the only thing that behaves like it hasn’t got one.

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

There is something fresh and crisp about the first hours of a Caribbean day, a happy anticipation that something is about to happen, maybe just up the street or around the next corner.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

All the blood is drained out of democracy – it dies – when only half the population votes.

Insanity is a legal term. Crazy is an art form.

I believe the Republicans have never thought that democracy was anything but a tribal myth.

The most important thing a writer can have [is] the ability to live with the constant loneliness and a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing.

The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa.

An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.

Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.

When the fact doesn’t meet the theory then let go the theory.

Trivial facts are often the best hints to what is going on.

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.

As a matter of fact, I find the Western cinema very fantastic.